Do you need a race car driver to run the national highway administration ?
No, but you do at least need someone who understands what is a "car" and what is a "highway". An administrator need not be an expert, but he bloody well does have to have a basic idea of what he is administrating.
There is no tritium in the sea to be harvested. Well, there might be some after Fukushima, but good luck chasing down these lone atoms all over Pacific.
Yeah... you don't know what you are talking about. Deuterium is abundant, no problem, you can buy heavy water from ebay ffs and there is no limit to making more, it just takes power. And practical D-T reactor designs all include tritium breeding from lithium, which is also abundant and cheap. There are many difficulties with fusion, fuel availability is not one of them.
Clearly there isn't a better way to control mosquitoes available, or a person wouldn't die of malaria every minute, now would they? Having the capability to wipe out malaria and choosing to not use it, is as good as killing that person yourself, every minute of every day. That inaction is a crime against humanity, there are no two ways about it. If I were a gene engineer working on the problem I would absolutely release the solution from the lab, no matter what the law, ethics committee or anyone else says. If I were in a position to wipe out malaria, I am pretty sure I could not choose inaction and live with that decision for the rest of my life as minutes and corpses are ticking by.
without fully knowing what the long-term consequences will be
Perhaps what we should start with known factual and at hand consequences of not doing anything. 216 million illness cases and 445,000 to 731,000 deaths, per year, every year. This is not a maybe, decades down the line, we don't know bullshit, this is reality today, right now. That's a corpse every minute you fail to make a decision, think about that very carefully.
Environmental protection argument stands on very shaky ground if you consider 200 million malaria cases and near half a million malaria deaths per year as the cost of your caution. I'd like to see greenpeace address grieving mothers and explain why deaths of their children were not prevented because it would have been a risk to the environment.
Hmmm yeah, you got a point, price will of course stabilize at whatever is required to meet the remaining demand. But still, the entire thing will be downgraded to just another industry, instead of an entire world turning economy.
Personal automotive EV transportation will never go mainstream
Already happening, perhaps not everywhere at the same pace but it's happening. In the end it will boil down to cost, the cheapness of charging vs fueling is what will sell it for most of the world. It certainly is making the sale in China and you won't find a bigger lot of penny pinchers anywhere in the world.
Fossil fuels are going nowhere unless we get a major attitude shift towards nuclear reactors or by some miracle fusion becomes viable. So not any time soon. That doesn't help saudis any though, power stations do not burn oil. Gas, coal, wood mash, garbage, whatever they can get their hands on really, but oil is too expensive. What keeps oil economies going are gasoline cars, and at current pace these are going the way of the dodo over the next decade or two.
Volumes of oil products used in chemical industry, plastics and everything else, pale in comparison to use as fuel. Sure, oil will be useful forever, but the price will be next to nothing if / when electric transport takes over. And at current pace, ~2030 seems like a reasonable tip over point, give or take 5 years. If electric transport keeps taking off like it does right now, then in a decade oil economies will be gutted, majority of income will just be gone, leaving only gaping holes in the budget. On the other hand, anyone who is today in battery manufacturing business will be stinking rich.
I wouldn't have said so even a few months ago, but a recent visit to Shenzhen forced a mental recalibration. Anyone visiting there, keep an eye out for green number plates, all these buses, cars and small delivery trucks are electric and most of them weren't there a year ago. Blue is gasoline and yellow is diesel. Never mind the electric bikes etc, these are old news. When we look back at history a decade from now, we'll mark 2018 as the year that electric cars really started going mainstream. It'll take years to get to world scale and reach every corner, never mind phasing out majority of gasoline cars, but right now is the moment this process really takes off.
Yet the Business class has been getting better and better, low economy prices keep going lower and we are seeing a new class being inserted between business and economy. Ever tried SAS economy plus? It's pretty good, they increased legroom and got rid of one entire row compared to regular economy allowing for wider seats. Others have settled for more legroom.
Let's face it, flying is a better value for the money than it used to be, true lowest price means means feeling like a sardine in a can, but it's not like you don't have more comfortable options available. Question is, do you really value your comfort enough to pay extra? For long flights I'd say economy plus is almost always worth it, unless your budget is really stretched. Business, well depends on how deep your pockets are, for most people it's too much. But if you are a frequent flyer then you get business upgrade every now and then for free, which is nice.
It's "possible" carcinogen, because it hasn't been proven not to be a carcinogen, despite thousands of experiments and studies the conclusion remains "more studies needed". Of course, out of that many studies you will get statistical flukes where data shows correlation to increased or decreased instances of cancer, but that's just the nature of statistics, vast majority of studies show no significance one way or another. There is no rational reason to expect there to be an actual causal relationship and indeed, data shows none, so why do we keep looking in the first place? Why don't we spend the same effort into looking if say, electric fans cause cancer? They could you know, don't ask me how, but they could, it's equally possible as cellphones causing cancer.
They also tried cats, frogs, mice, pigeons both male and female and whatever other animals they could get their hands on and male rats were the only ones that gave p0.05. Cherry picking at it's finest. If radio causes cancer then it does so regardless of species or gender. Stop beating this dead horse of a subject, there is an experiment that has been ongoing for a century now, to date involving 7 billion human test subjects. If radio was causing cancer it would be bloody obvious to everyone by now. If you can't detect the effect in general population then you certainly won't find it in few thousand rats, regardless of the rats being male or female.
You will once these kids grow up used to annoying adds everywhere, all over the place all the bloody time. Better get used to an idea of your phone waking you up 4am to advertise insomnia drugs to you, because if businesses could get away with doing that shit, they would. And if the next generation grows up used to adds all the bloody time everywhere, hey soon enough they will.
Smartphones are in serious need of a thriving open source ecosystem.
Investing in what though, nothing in what their core business is doing reflects towards massive investments under the table. The amount of money they should have to throw around should buy them some really swanky R&D to put towards their core business. But it doesn't show. Are they investing in things unrelated to their own business? That wouldn't make much sense, that's just not in "how to build your megacorp" handbook. Maybe they have the regular expenses just ridiculously high and it eats up all the margins, could be, wouldn't be first corporation to fail in this way. It's easy to spend oodles of money and get very little done.
I obviously don't know, but something stinks, this is not how successful megacorps operate, ever. Look at Google in comparison, what are they doing with their money. They stuff it down every hole that looks even remotely promising, some of it has been very successful indeed, most less so. But the main thing is they are constantly looking for their next big break on every front they can think of. That's what you do if you are swimming in money and plan to stay around long term, unless your core business is so cushy that you can just rest on your laurels. Basically anyone who is not an oil giant, military contractor, power company or some-such is constantly bending over backwards to find their next big cashcow. Apple just keeps milking their old one and stuffs the leftover money under mattress. Makes no sense whatsoever.
Of course there are, how discrete logic and specifically an adder works is a basic part of CS curriculum world over, there are certainly more than 100k people who could do it from discrete transistors, relays or valves without ever having to check internet for help. Might take a bit of head scratching and trial and error for most, but certainly nothing a semi-competent electronics engineer or programmer couldn't do at all. And anyone who can do an adder can with a fair bit extra head scratching also put together some multiplier and divider circuits, though probably not very efficient ones. The ones who know how to make more efficient logic circuits, the kinds that are actually used in modern processors, now they are rare, but almost any old Joe can do the basic ones that are fully functional, if perhaps not quite as fast or efficient as possible..
Why bother with ISS, if you can get something to latch onto it, then that something can carry gyros already and turn the telescope wherever it needs to point.
The gyros are not for measuring the rotation, you can do that just fine by looking at the stars. The gyros are for actually moving the satellite, you turn the gyro one way, the satellite turns the other way, conservation of angular momentum. With only 2 gyros there is now one axis where rotation cannot be precisely controlled.
I think they have launched something like that as one of their secondary payloads, not their own design, but but one of their customers had a satellite life extender system. The idea being, that the system would dock or grapple an out of fuel comms sat and have enough fuel for stationkeeping on board to extend its service life. Such a thing would necessarily have full orientation control, so there you go, also a fix for broken gyros.
Why would it be out of spec? Dragon can be launched on lunar free return trajectory, that's way beyond what is needed to meet up with Hubble and way beyond what Shuttle could have done. Downsides would be that there is no airlock, so entire capsule would have to be depressurized for EVA, but that's an inconvenience not a technical showstopper. There is also no robot arm, so manual capture required, but that's very much doable, I think they did the same with shuttle at least once, with a completely defunct and free spinning satellite no less. With 2/6 gyros functional on Hubble, it should be very much doable. The entire thing might be demanding on crew, and a bit reminiscent of early days of space tech, but very much within technical spec of Dragon and Falcon. Tho Dragon 2 is not yet qualified, or even had a maiden flight, so there is that. For what it's worth, the mission could probably also be done with a Soyuz. It's not that the mission would be exceptionally demanding on the spacecraft, it's that Shuttle was an exceptionally large and heavy thing to lug all the way to orbit and even harder to reenter with from high up, so anything higher than ISS, was stretching it's capabilities.
Clock speed limit is not in how fast you can switch a gate. What's the wavelength of a 1THz signal? 300um in vacuum, some percentage of that in silicon wave guide. If any of your clock lanes in longer than that, then the clock is different at the beginning of the lane from what it is in the end of the lane, uh-oh, trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
He doesn't even understand the purpose of the organization he is running, you can replace him with a monkey and get the same results.
How is he supposed to know who is qualified for the job if he doesn't even understand what the job is?
Do you need a race car driver to run the national highway administration ?
No, but you do at least need someone who understands what is a "car" and what is a "highway". An administrator need not be an expert, but he bloody well does have to have a basic idea of what he is administrating.
75% of universe is hydrogen, 25% is helium, 0.00007% is everything else, it'll be awhile before we run out.
There is no tritium in the sea to be harvested. Well, there might be some after Fukushima, but good luck chasing down these lone atoms all over Pacific.
Yeah... you don't know what you are talking about. Deuterium is abundant, no problem, you can buy heavy water from ebay ffs and there is no limit to making more, it just takes power. And practical D-T reactor designs all include tritium breeding from lithium, which is also abundant and cheap. There are many difficulties with fusion, fuel availability is not one of them.
Clearly there isn't a better way to control mosquitoes available, or a person wouldn't die of malaria every minute, now would they? Having the capability to wipe out malaria and choosing to not use it, is as good as killing that person yourself, every minute of every day. That inaction is a crime against humanity, there are no two ways about it. If I were a gene engineer working on the problem I would absolutely release the solution from the lab, no matter what the law, ethics committee or anyone else says. If I were in a position to wipe out malaria, I am pretty sure I could not choose inaction and live with that decision for the rest of my life as minutes and corpses are ticking by.
without fully knowing what the long-term consequences will be
Perhaps what we should start with known factual and at hand consequences of not doing anything. 216 million illness cases and 445,000 to 731,000 deaths, per year, every year. This is not a maybe, decades down the line, we don't know bullshit, this is reality today, right now. That's a corpse every minute you fail to make a decision, think about that very carefully.
Environmental protection argument stands on very shaky ground if you consider 200 million malaria cases and near half a million malaria deaths per year as the cost of your caution. I'd like to see greenpeace address grieving mothers and explain why deaths of their children were not prevented because it would have been a risk to the environment.
Hmmm yeah, you got a point, price will of course stabilize at whatever is required to meet the remaining demand. But still, the entire thing will be downgraded to just another industry, instead of an entire world turning economy.
Personal automotive EV transportation will never go mainstream
Already happening, perhaps not everywhere at the same pace but it's happening. In the end it will boil down to cost, the cheapness of charging vs fueling is what will sell it for most of the world. It certainly is making the sale in China and you won't find a bigger lot of penny pinchers anywhere in the world.
Fossil fuels are going nowhere unless we get a major attitude shift towards nuclear reactors or by some miracle fusion becomes viable. So not any time soon. That doesn't help saudis any though, power stations do not burn oil. Gas, coal, wood mash, garbage, whatever they can get their hands on really, but oil is too expensive. What keeps oil economies going are gasoline cars, and at current pace these are going the way of the dodo over the next decade or two.
I wouldn't have said so even a few months ago, but a recent visit to Shenzhen forced a mental recalibration. Anyone visiting there, keep an eye out for green number plates, all these buses, cars and small delivery trucks are electric and most of them weren't there a year ago. Blue is gasoline and yellow is diesel. Never mind the electric bikes etc, these are old news. When we look back at history a decade from now, we'll mark 2018 as the year that electric cars really started going mainstream. It'll take years to get to world scale and reach every corner, never mind phasing out majority of gasoline cars, but right now is the moment this process really takes off.
Let's face it, flying is a better value for the money than it used to be, true lowest price means means feeling like a sardine in a can, but it's not like you don't have more comfortable options available. Question is, do you really value your comfort enough to pay extra? For long flights I'd say economy plus is almost always worth it, unless your budget is really stretched. Business, well depends on how deep your pockets are, for most people it's too much. But if you are a frequent flyer then you get business upgrade every now and then for free, which is nice.
But more seriously, the phones will be coming when the networks start actully coming online, which will by and large be next year.
It's "possible" carcinogen, because it hasn't been proven not to be a carcinogen, despite thousands of experiments and studies the conclusion remains "more studies needed". Of course, out of that many studies you will get statistical flukes where data shows correlation to increased or decreased instances of cancer, but that's just the nature of statistics, vast majority of studies show no significance one way or another. There is no rational reason to expect there to be an actual causal relationship and indeed, data shows none, so why do we keep looking in the first place? Why don't we spend the same effort into looking if say, electric fans cause cancer? They could you know, don't ask me how, but they could, it's equally possible as cellphones causing cancer.
They also tried cats, frogs, mice, pigeons both male and female and whatever other animals they could get their hands on and male rats were the only ones that gave p0.05. Cherry picking at it's finest. If radio causes cancer then it does so regardless of species or gender. Stop beating this dead horse of a subject, there is an experiment that has been ongoing for a century now, to date involving 7 billion human test subjects. If radio was causing cancer it would be bloody obvious to everyone by now. If you can't detect the effect in general population then you certainly won't find it in few thousand rats, regardless of the rats being male or female.
Smartphones are in serious need of a thriving open source ecosystem.
I obviously don't know, but something stinks, this is not how successful megacorps operate, ever. Look at Google in comparison, what are they doing with their money. They stuff it down every hole that looks even remotely promising, some of it has been very successful indeed, most less so. But the main thing is they are constantly looking for their next big break on every front they can think of. That's what you do if you are swimming in money and plan to stay around long term, unless your core business is so cushy that you can just rest on your laurels. Basically anyone who is not an oil giant, military contractor, power company or some-such is constantly bending over backwards to find their next big cashcow. Apple just keeps milking their old one and stuffs the leftover money under mattress. Makes no sense whatsoever.
Of course there are, how discrete logic and specifically an adder works is a basic part of CS curriculum world over, there are certainly more than 100k people who could do it from discrete transistors, relays or valves without ever having to check internet for help. Might take a bit of head scratching and trial and error for most, but certainly nothing a semi-competent electronics engineer or programmer couldn't do at all. And anyone who can do an adder can with a fair bit extra head scratching also put together some multiplier and divider circuits, though probably not very efficient ones. The ones who know how to make more efficient logic circuits, the kinds that are actually used in modern processors, now they are rare, but almost any old Joe can do the basic ones that are fully functional, if perhaps not quite as fast or efficient as possible..
Why bother with ISS, if you can get something to latch onto it, then that something can carry gyros already and turn the telescope wherever it needs to point.
The gyros are not for measuring the rotation, you can do that just fine by looking at the stars. The gyros are for actually moving the satellite, you turn the gyro one way, the satellite turns the other way, conservation of angular momentum. With only 2 gyros there is now one axis where rotation cannot be precisely controlled.
I think they have launched something like that as one of their secondary payloads, not their own design, but but one of their customers had a satellite life extender system. The idea being, that the system would dock or grapple an out of fuel comms sat and have enough fuel for stationkeeping on board to extend its service life. Such a thing would necessarily have full orientation control, so there you go, also a fix for broken gyros.
Why would it be out of spec? Dragon can be launched on lunar free return trajectory, that's way beyond what is needed to meet up with Hubble and way beyond what Shuttle could have done. Downsides would be that there is no airlock, so entire capsule would have to be depressurized for EVA, but that's an inconvenience not a technical showstopper. There is also no robot arm, so manual capture required, but that's very much doable, I think they did the same with shuttle at least once, with a completely defunct and free spinning satellite no less. With 2/6 gyros functional on Hubble, it should be very much doable. The entire thing might be demanding on crew, and a bit reminiscent of early days of space tech, but very much within technical spec of Dragon and Falcon. Tho Dragon 2 is not yet qualified, or even had a maiden flight, so there is that. For what it's worth, the mission could probably also be done with a Soyuz. It's not that the mission would be exceptionally demanding on the spacecraft, it's that Shuttle was an exceptionally large and heavy thing to lug all the way to orbit and even harder to reenter with from high up, so anything higher than ISS, was stretching it's capabilities.
Clock speed limit is not in how fast you can switch a gate. What's the wavelength of a 1THz signal? 300um in vacuum, some percentage of that in silicon wave guide. If any of your clock lanes in longer than that, then the clock is different at the beginning of the lane from what it is in the end of the lane, uh-oh, trouble.